Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “That is a weakness to be cured in childhood,” said his father firmly, and dragged him out with his sister Catherine, across country, up and down slopes and on the edges of the cliffs. Once he made him descend the cliff at Rosa Gully, a precipitous opening in the cliffs, formed by the crumbling of a basaltic dyke, where a few rocks stand in the waves and make a fishing foothold. His sister Kate sprang down without help, but Michael stuck half-way almost dead with terror and vertigo, and his father, though furious, had to carry him the rest of the way on his back. Michael closed his eyes, and after a long time found his feet on firm ground; he looked up at the tall cliff, shuddering. The waves dashed and whistled in the narrow cleft. His father carried him back up the cliff and never tried his great cure for vertigo again. But Michael, impressed with the horrors of that day, often went to the verge of the highest cliff, sat under a sandstone boulder and looked out at the smooth blue sea and flawless sky, to feel adolescence creeping on him, and the surges of excitement which made him at one moment want to throw himself savagely at the lawny slopes and bite them, like an animal, and at the next, to leap from the cliff among the seagulls, ending fatally but sweetly in the sea.

  He said to his mother, “Am I your son?” and at her startled question, only replied: “I don’t know why I said it. I can’t believe I’m anybody’s son. I feel as if I just grew out of myself.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  His father thought the time ripe to inform him of the mysteries. He was himself an amateur naturalist and gathered orchids. Taking his son before the pots of orchids arranged in a glassed lean-to at the back of the house, he explained to him pollen, ovule; he vaguely called in the help of the sparrows engaged in flirting on the guttering.

  When he was twelve, his father inherited five thousand pounds from a childless bachelor friend of his named Bassett, a retired surveyor and amateur astronomer, who was a little queer in his last years and built himself a hut in the bush on the North Shore in order to work out a system of divination by the movements of planets. The legacy caused surprise, for the old friends had not corresponded since Bassett’s retirement, Bassett’s peculiarities making him cranky and misanthropic. With part of the money the Baguenaults bought themselves a house in the new suburbs of the North Shore, where the ground was cheap, the soil good, and the bush almost undisturbed. Michael’s two sisters now had scholarships at the University, Kate was put in a boarding-school, because she had got out of hand, and Michael was alone at home. Mr Baguenault speculated in gold and oil shares and made money. Their house was airy, with wide verandahs on three sides, and stood far back from the street, in a partly cultivated garden that looked over a gully. They seemed to have the mild wilderness to themselves. Across the street was visible from the top windows a flourishing, spacious graveyard. Michael’s mother began to be regarded with consideration in the community, because of her interests in charity, and her two clever daughters at the University. Catherine was not mentioned, nor Michael, who was sent to an undistinguished private school recommended by an ambitious priest whom Mrs Baguenault met at afternoon tea.

  Michael was weedy at twelve. He caught diphtheria at the school and was ill a long time. The still hours of convalescence bred light fancies, and these returned to him, rounder and brighter, when he drowsed. He was outside lying on a long chair one morning and came to himself to observe his father standing stockstill among the sweet-pea stakes, looking at him intently. When he saw Michael move, he closed his eyes and then opened them, remarking that he had been thinking there in the sun about sweet-peas. There were too many blooms, he must carry a handful to Mrs Vickers, who had none. The peculiar glance of his father turned Michael’s thoughts into a gloomy channel. His father, obtuse in his sympathies, was maliciously alert when he found people depressed. Michael did not like him at all. Now, after looking at him again with an unusual persistence, his father said unexpectedly:

  “Take care of yourself, Michael; you have been at death’s door,” and sauntered down towards the orchard, singing “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case.”

  Someone had said before that he had been at death’s door, and that metaphor, yawning, produced many ideas of solitariness, cold, fear and mental penury. He now said to himself that his hesitant, susceptible, timorous nature would be his ruin; for example, his father, whom he despised, with his orchids and surveying, still had entire dominion over him. If he spoke an idea out aloud and his father guffawed, he felt nauseous: “I will never be any different,” he said now, in his convalescent weakness. Yet that same morning as he lay on his couch he felt a new crystalline person arise out of him, as if he had given rise to a new third. He had found a time-yellowed book among his father’s old books and read that “the maniac was merely too much awake, as a man possessed by a demon would have excessive strength, excessive malice”. He felt his head swelling with each successive phrase like a bud.

  When he looked over the edge of the woven rattan at the garden, everything was more lively than a moment before. The dusty leaves blazed, the grass reared itself with a pugnacious thrust, the plants were marshalled, the snail crawled over the leaf with a rushing voluptuous impulse, and all animal and vegetable creations were aware of the sun, wind, sky, shadow, and of their neighbours and of the footfalls and shadows of men, through prehensile senses. A ladybird on the melon-leaf looked like a tortoise; the melon, scarcely pressing the grass, rolled in space as a green universe, self-creative. He thought of the growth of the melon, and immediately saw it bounding towards maturity. The veils of the flesh were torn; he saw the sun pouring in torrents through translucent creatures with millions of cells. Dehiscent seeds burst, pods split, sheaths flew back, grass sprouted, ants scurried, the sun leaped, the sky vibrated, sap hissed, the eucalypt at the foot of the path arched its foolish light head, and the cicadas shouted to turn one’s brain. At the same moment that he feared he would lose this pitch of vision, indeed, the phoenix passed over the house, leaving no more than a bright feather, a brilliant hour, for him ruefully to contemplate. He felt dimly that he had in his bosom, if he could only force it out, the secret of greatness; that if he could always be as he had been that moment, his mere word would sway vast crowds of men.

  His father often quoted to him: “And they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.” He stayed awake that night to see if he could toil upwards in the night. A slight fever aided him. The night passed. He slept a little in the day and tossed. The night approached again, and when all had gone to bed he got up and smoothed his pillow.

  He stood a long time at his window looking over the garden, street and churchyard on the second night of his vigil. The river of heaven flowed wide, deep and windless, and the suffocated stars rolled slowly on their white flanks through the celestial currents. It was October; the strewn silver meteors shaken fresh from the airy crests went silting and glinting down through the signs of the zodiac, and the hoofs of the Centaur, plunging and curvetting, beat up the dust of the Milky Way. The early morning moon in its last quarter sank gradually to the foot of the sky and entered the feathery boughs of the churchyard yews. Its sallow beam stole over the scattered tombs like bones, sunken in wet clay and smirched with mosses; it drew out the coarse grass and ivy-ends in shadows. Sleep crouched malignantly over the houses. Many bodies in disordered beds struggled with the phantasms abroad; the feeble beam which now entered Michael’s bedroom horizontally showed his bed distinctly on its four legs as if ready to career off bewitched. The sheets were smooth and the pillow unpressed. The moonbeam laboured from the open book on the table beside an extinguished candle to Michael’s shoulder and on to his pale quarter-moon cheek, capped with black hair and deeply graved in profile.

  A slight noise began in the garden. The wind, after raising itself irresolutely three times, moved across the sill and passed over the page which lay curled upon Michael’s hand; a faint sound was heard. Michael stirred, pressed his fingers into his eyes a
nd struggled up out of the sickly lethargy into which he had sunk. The breeze reflectively turned over one more page of the book. Michael’s eyes swam in their orbits. He looked without interest at the dull moon and lawn. Then his glance moved to the top of the torrid flood of air. His wits turning topsy-turvy rolled upward along the eyebeam, and once more began wandering and stumbling about among rhythms and numbers hideously mixed: visions had long deserted him and he was now in a chaos of tottering gulfs and complex mazes. His heart went on counting stupidly, plom-ploum, plom-ploum, but except for that one earthly thing, he was lost. He seemed to sit in a conciliabule of black extinguisher hats looking at processions of abstract geometrical forms. He reeled against the pane and stood thus, drunk with fatigue. A cock crew, the moon lay on the horizon, the large hole which someone had cut for the turf in the graveyard looked black and deep.

  The daylight began to grow in slow undulations. Michael dreamed. The slow, wilful wind rose and sank around the foundations. Moths hovered round the persimmon tree, crickets zithered in the sourgrass, lizards scit-scuttled on the path, and purple-stained wingcases filled the shrubbery night with a slick, minor lightning; all bewitched garden Lilliput, motley and flea-brained, continued its multitudinous creeping and exhausting razzle-dazzle.

  Michael lighted the candle. But the bare edges of the table obliterated his dreams; he blew the candle out. In the south he heard faintly the continued droning of the metropolis, and beyond the valley at the bottom of the orchard came the ribanded shrieks of freight-engines labouring towards the city. Beneath the wind was the delicate chipping of the leaves against the stucco wall; an occasional soft surge disturbed the sleep of the turpentines on the next hill. Their street lay drugged in sleep and the churchyard was dark, freed from the dead eye of the lunar world, now dropping out of sight. Hours ago the last footfall had gone rapidly along the pavement; it was the footfall of a woman, he knew, for the light and unequal tapping left the pavement when it came to the church and hurried along the middle of the road where the moon then shone clear. He waited. A cock crew again. Another answered him, and he heard the call going all over the district, diminishing and increasing, moving in discords of twos and threes, and ending suddenly in silence, close at hand, when the first cock crew last and for all. A smile of beatitude flowed over his face; he put his face against the cool plastered wall and tears trickled out; morning was at hand. At the same time he heard someone coming down the street, a firm, crisp, lonely tread, the tread of the early workman. He did not look out of the window again, he was too weak, but he heard the steps surprisingly near till they resounded as if the pavement had been hollow: they lessened and passed on in the distance. Michael, ravaged by waking dreams, thought the man had passed through his breast.

  He fell into bed like a log. He opened his eyes a little while afterwards and saw half a red-hot platter risen above the horizon; the birds were making a deafening clatter. “The sun is up,” said Michael, and fell dead asleep until twelve o’clock, when his mother, frightened, wakened him. “Let me sleep,” said Michael, “I will be better when I wake up.”

  His mother told her friends of the miraculous sleep that cured him entirely. For a few months he was happy. His parents took advantage of his good days to give him moral advice, to urge him to work at school, and to vaunt him to their friends. “Michael has changed so much; you know at this period . . .” He thought it patronage, got angry with them and with everyone about the house, wanted to live alone, in a forest, on a hill-top. He hoped his father and mother, or at least his father, would die so that he could live alone and free. He wished he had been born a Bedouin to range the desert like a lion, or in some tribe of natives where the little boys were all lodged and taught together. He moved circularly. He learned along the courses of his passions. To himself he seemed either curiously talented with mystic virtues, or a tatterdemalion. He was untidy about his dress, never cleaned his shoes, hated washing his hands and feet, and felt his clothes unbearably thick, clumsy and ill-cut on him; and for this he blamed his parents. He had a very poor grasp of ordinary life: he could not bear a reproach, and would have killed a person who remonstrated with him if he had not feared the prison or reformatory. He was thrown off his balance, and suffered headaches and nausea many times on account of arguments or scoldings. He cried out at night, dreaming that he was suffocating or being attacked by bears, or being followed by gigantic funereal phantoms, and he had half a dozen tics, twisting his hair, biting his cheeks, scratching his gums with his nails, plucking his knee. He had austere ideals. He would not cry out when the door shut on him, when a boy stuck a pin into him, when the doctor came to sew up a wound where a dog bit him: but he would cry when his father said something insulting to him, for a joke. He scarcely spoke to the other children except to say, “The reason is . . .” “That comes from . . .” or in analogy, “Cloth flows like water . . .”

  He did not play much at school, could not bear to take part in the gang quarrels of the boys, liked to sit behind bushes and enter into long colloquies with friendly children, about marbles, history, the sky, ghosts, the characters of the teachers. He was inarticulate in his love-affairs and suffered intensely for them. He preferred to maunder about amongst rocks, trees, pools of water, beside the sea, in the wind, in the bush rushing with storm where he could divine or imagine presences, voices, miracles. At such times he would feel a rush of saliva in the mouth, and his jaws would work of themselves as if it were imperious for him to cry aloud, to make a speech, to chant. And when he was alone in his room at night, drowsy, he heard long conversations carried on between his teeth and his tongue, between the towel and the washstand, the mosquito and the ceiling he was hitting. Whenever he stood on one foot gazing into the garden, or propped himself against the door looking dreamily about him, or pored a long time over some stuff or surface examining its grain, he was listening with half his mind to these interminable, stupid conversations which went on inside him.

  “Floor, you are dusty, but I am dustier still.”

  “Mat, I know you are dustier still, but that is because everyone treads on you, your design will soon be worn off and you will be nothing but dust.”

  “But it is good dust, worth having, the dust off the feet of these great creatures.”

  “Pooh, they got it in the garden, where dogs have pissed and cats stink.”

  “What do I care if I’m dirty, that’s my mission; I don’t mind accomplishing my mission.”

  “I prefer to shine with floor-wax.”

  This inaudible whispering would keep up for hours; and if it was not a dialogue between two objects or creatures, it was an argument between himself and some creature, an ant, a cloud, a coat. He liked to be alone.

  He was lively on birthdays, on Christmas Day, when he was sure to get some presents. He awakened in the early morning, gay, tingling, full of jokes; the whole day he was flushed and amiable, helping his mother, doing whatever his father wanted, complimenting his sisters, making them gifts. If he got a new suit, he would be merry too, and if there was a party given in the house, he hung about, did tricks in the doorway, and recited poetry until he was reproved and sent away. He received twopence a week to spend, and would spend it gladly every Saturday, looking over his new possessions all the afternoon, eating slowly and pleasurably the sweets he had bought, and hating to give any away.

  Michael now took to science and would engage with any of the teachers in religious, philosophic and logical discussions; his long years of fanciful reasoning had given him an agility in argument; he found himself in his words, the schoolmen’s world, the world of pure verbalism. In Botany, once, having drawn thirty diagrams of the stages of union of two cells of the gutter-weed, Spirogyra, which is thin and long like a green hair, a kind of frenzy took hold of him. He looked through the microscope and saw that not only was the series, taken as a series of poses, like a cinematograph, infinite, but that even with all his care and preoccupation he could not seize the important moment of change, i
t was not there, it seemed to him mystic. When he saw a person going downstairs and compared the last appearance of that one’s head with the empty space when he was no longer there, the change seemed to him infinitely great, even impossible, a freak that could not take place in the natural world in which he breathed. In his imagination a thing was, and then disappeared, dark remained, and in between was a space of dreams, of nonentity. He held up his mind, a cracked and yellow mirror to reflect the machinery of the world, and in that dark space the world ceased for a moment to exist.

  But at these times especially, he would fall back against his seat or lean on his elbow looking out of the window at the trees, and powerful visions would pass through his head; he laboured automatically to increase and perfect these visions, to make them logical, grandiose. He believed in intellectual miracles. He suffered states which were ecstasy, although they were not joyful but rapt and inhuman. In those moments he gave out cold as a genial person gives out warmth and love.

  One day when the school was out on a picnic, the headmaster walked a little way aside with him. “Your character is like that ship,” said he, looking down from the heights of a bay; “it can be guided by you, your will the pilot, or cast away, for the immediate gain in a cheap profession, or the pleasures a young man likes, or cast adrift and someone, man or woman, may earn the salvage of it.”